Magnetic North Pole and Garmin GPS Devices

The magnetic north pole moves around all the time; this causes the magnetic field strength, magnetic declination angle, and magnetic inclination angle at any given location on Earth to vary over time.  Roughly every 5 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) releases an update for the World Magnetic Model (WMM) to model and forecast those variations over the next 5 years.  

Garmin uses the NOAA World Magnetic Model in our code for some devices to compute True North from the Magnetic North, and Magnetic North to compute True North.  

Not updating the magnetic models in our products will cause the True North computed from the Magnetic North and vice versa to not be accurate, especially above the Arctic Circle.

Recently, we updated our code to use the latest magnetic model (WMM20215v2) released on January 30th, 2019.